Overlooked niches when growing games globally

Outside of China, 60% of gaming user acquisition spend is concentrated in five markets: the U.S., South Korea, Japan, Germany, and France. The U.S. alone accounts for 40% of global UA spend outside of China: it’s where the largest concentration of high-value players can be found. But if you are growing games globally, it might be a mistake to just focus on the U.S., or just the big 5, or just China, which is of course itself a massive mobile gaming market.

And is it possible that you’re wasting marketing dollars by only doing user acquisition where you always have done it in the past?

I recently spent half an hour with Tom Shadbolt. He’s Moloco’s senior marketing insights manager, and he just completed a report on global gaming spend, analyzing 4,000 apps with $3B in IAP revenue across 195 countries.

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Growing games globally: where to spend

It’s always a valid question: go where you know, or try new options? New options, of course, add the challenge of a learning curve:

“ As performance marketers we are very much focused on that short term, but we also need to marry that with longer term opportunity,” Shadbolt says. “We were able to see pockets of opportunity that advertisers are exploiting already in Europe and Asia, but we’re also able to see markets like Brazil and India and South Africa where the viability of UA is increasing over time.”

Growing games globally is expensive: Moloco estimates that global gaming spend in 2025 for marketers aiming to boost in-app purchases will hit $29 billion. 

And it’s going to stay fairly concentrated:

While most marketers are thinking about the big countries at the top of the chart, Shadbolt says UA can efficiently drive growth in others as well, like Brazil, Greece, Iceland, the Netherlands, South Africa, and the United Arab Emirates.

How?

Using the right ad networks is key: advanced targeting techniques and machine learning play a huge role in identifying high-value users in more niche markets, and marketers will need to commit to continual testing and experimentation if they wish to uncover those growth opportunities.

This is how Chinese gaming companies work

Interestingly, this is exactly the strategy we see from Chinese gaming companies, which have been tremendously successful globally. According to 1 source, 38 of the top 100 global mobile game publishers are from China.

“Diversifying media budgets is incredibly important and we see advertisers take advantage of this already,” says Shadbolt. “So when you look at the Chinese mobile app gaming advertisers, they have much more diversified spend: they are sort of focusing opportunities across EMEA, across APAC, across the U.S.”

“And they’re seeing great success. And when you compare that to U.S.-based advertisers who are actually spending up to 60% of their budgets in North America, the question becomes, are we over-concentrating and are there opportunities to take more of a global mindset?”

Most U.S. game publishers spend most of their budget in North America, and much lower percentages elsewhere. Most Chinese game publishers even out their UA spend between North America, Europe, APAC, and the rest of the world … as well as China, of course.

A key reason:

There’s a lot of value out there in terms of ARPPU (average revenue per paying user), which is great to hit if you’re growing games globally.

What’s clear is that the traditional mobile marketers’ segmentation of Tier 1 (US), Tier 2 (Europe), and other markets is now essentially outdated. 

Sometimes just English works, but often not

This does mean localization, of course.

While 50% of gaming UA spend will be against English-speaking players, Shadbolt says, if you really want to go beyond English-first and English-proficient markets, you’re going to need to localize your game.

Especially in East Asia.

“Through the report, we highlight East Asia as a market of huge potential, with high user value in some of these genres, but also one of the hardest markets to crack in terms of localizing apps and meeting local expectations,” says Shadbolt.

That can be genre-specific as well: RPG is popular in east Asia, Match and Casino games are popular in the U.S.

Grouping markets by cultural or language tendencies can help in strategizing expansion plans and lessening localization costs and complexity.

Growing games globally: much more in in the full podcast (and report)

Check out the full podcast on YouTube or wherever you get your audio podcasts, and see the report for more details.

What you can expect:

• 00:00 Global Growth Opportunities
• 00:54 Key Insights from the Report
• 02:56 Top Markets for Gaming UA Spend
• 05:44 Challenges and Strategies for Global Expansion
• 10:04 Diverging Strategies for iOS and Android
• 11:35 Finding the Right Market for Your Game
• 13:23 Localization and Market Segmentation
• 14:34 Average Revenue Per User (ARPU) Insights
• 16:42 Experimentation and Long-Term Strategies
• 20:09 Conclusion and Final Thoughts